The OAATM News
Previous Issue Vol 2, no. 1, January 1, 1998

OAA 2.0 Tutoral at PAAM-98!

A tutorial on constructing distributed agent applications will be be presented by David Martin and Adam Cheyer at the 3rd International conference on The Practical Application of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agents, Monday March 23 - Wednesday March 25, 1998, London, UK. This tutorial, aimed at software developers, describes several different types of agent-based systems and strategies for implementing them. Examples and lessons learned will be drawn from the application areas that SRI has been involved in over the last few years, including
  • Personal assistants
  • Agent-based support for emergency response teams
  • Intelligence analysis environments
  • Agents for information search, retrieval, and management
  • Coordination of robotic agents

Subject to time constraints, the presentation will include:

  • Systems integration
    • Agentification of legacy systems
    • Interoperability across heterogeneous languages and platforms
    • Integrating with object-oriented standards

  • Tools & techniques
    • Design of agent-based systems
    • Tools for specifying individual agents and communities of agents
    • Reuse of agents
    • Debugging distributed systems

  • User Interfaces to distributed agents
    • Multimodal interfaces
    • Ubiquitous access to agent services
    • Collaboration among multiple humans/agents
    • Animated personas
    • Agent-based implementation of interfaces

    The tutorial will also include an introduction to programming within SRI's Open Agent ArchitectureTM, the agent-based framework used to implement the applications mentioned above. A public version of OAATM 2.0 will soon be available for download from the Web.

    The presenters, from the AI Center of SRI International, have been involved in the development of agent technologies since 1993.